/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.3363361]

Do you read much contemporary literature /lit/?

If so do you find yourself inclined toward the output of a certain country and are there any particular writers whose output you enjoy reading?

Making this thread out curiosity because individual mentions on here often do not extend beyond the likes of Wallace, Pynchon, Murakami and Bolano

[demiurge No.3363366]

a fair bit, yeah. more non-fiction than fiction. i have 25 post-2000 books in my to-read list.

[Anonymous No.3363373]

No. I have way too much catching up to do. There's so much damn good writing in the past that I've yet to dig through.

[Anonymous No.3363397]

Not really. I worry it'll all be stuff such as:

>I got on my laptop and checked my emails
>I went on my favourite forum and became angry
>I then jerked off and continued browsing the forum
>I watched some music videos on youtube
>The moral of the story is life is meaningless, but you can deal with it anyway.

[Anonymous No.3363401]

>>3363397
Not everyone is Tao Lin, Anonymous.

[Anonymous No.3363688]

>reading contemporary
>not being retarded

pick one

[Anonymous No.3363709]

I read an okay amount of it.

Manuela Draeger, Sjon, Ben Loory, Olga Tokarczuk, Amelia Gray, Atiq Rahimi, Kuzhali Manickavel, Peter Markus, Alois Hotschnig, Andrzej Stasiuk, George Saunders, Zoran Zivkovic, Richard Weihe, Kjersti Skomsvold, Yoko Ogawa, Ben Marcus, Petra Hulova, Liliana Ursu, Ewald Murrer and others.

I don't think I'm drawn to any particular country's writers, but I do like to try out the lit from lots and lots of countries. I have some Ondjaki that I got from the library now, to try out more contemporary Angolan literature (I liked the Pepetela I read).

[Anonymous No.3363719]

>>3363366
What are some of those 25?

[Anonymous No.3363725]

contemporary literature thread in 4chan lit?
you don't know anything

[demiurge No.3363733]

>>3363719
-Badiou's translation of the republic,
-Baldwin Rosencrans' You Lost Me There
-The Power of Film by Howard Suber
-No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July
-The Years of Rice and Salt
-Empire Falls
-The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy

i think this is pretty representative of the entire list.

[Anonymous No.3363740]

I've read some Will Self, that is as contemporary as I get

[Anonymous No.3363742]

>>3363725
As in OP made a bad choice in making the thread, or that none of /lit/ knows anything about contemporary literature?

[Anonymous No.3363746]

>>3363733

Shit, Badiou's translation looks fucking amazing. That Miranda July is on my current list as well. I'm also going to try and plough through some Graham Harman (seems important) and Jared Diamond (seems interesting as fuck).

[Anonymous No.3363749]

>>3363742

Both are certainly true.

[Anonymous No.3363753]

i like john dies at the end

[Anonymous No.3363760]

>>3363749
There are a handful of people here who read contemporary literature extensively. I don't think it's fair to say absolutely all of /lit/ knows nothing about it.

[Anonymous No.3363768]

[demiurge No.3363772]

>>3363746
counterbalance that jared diamond with some Janet Abu-Lughod and Fernand Braudel

you'll be happy you did seriously

[Anonymous No.3363776]

>>3363361

contemporary literature is irrelevant. Now post more picss like this one.

[Anonymous No.3363777]

I read mostly contemporary literature. I am not ignorant of the classics but I read, in part, to understand the contemporary situation. Contemporary literature explores precisely that, while classical literature can point to the unchanging horizon.

[Anonymous No.3363785]

>>3363776

This. Please.

[Anonymous No.3363803]

>>3363785
I also support this.

[Anonymous No.3363811]

>>3363772
Would you recommend particular books of theirs?

[Anonymous No.3363812]

>>3363772

Braudel is on my list eventually... de Landa raves about him. Abu-Lughod added to investigation list.

[demiurge No.3363857]

>>3363811
well the big one is La Méditerranée [...] but you should check out his books and see if the ones on capitalism or french identity appeal more to you.

Abu-Lughod, you should check out Before European Hegemony, which is superb, and maybe either the one about Cairo or Morocco.

>>3363812
can you recommend anything by de Landa?

[Anonymous No.3363883]

>>3363857
Thanks for the recommendations! Just ordered the Abu-Lughod--it looks fascinating.

[demiurge No.3363895]

>>3363883
no problem anon! i'm glad to help. post a thread about it after you're done with it and we can talk about it.

[Anonymous No.3363934]

I read a bit of contemporary literature. I hadn't thought of whether or not I'm more interested in a particular country's literature until now, and looking at the books I have on my desk hasn't exactly steered me towards the realisation that I Have Only Been Reading Turkish Novels Recently.

I have been reading: Penelope Fitzgerald, M. John Harrison, Peter Carey, Jonathan Raban, Orhan Pamuk and Tove Jansson recently. Carey and Pamuk are well enough known as it is, so I'll just ramble on about the others for a bit:

While Jansson's been getting a little bit more attention recently, with her books being rereleased in english, she's still somewhat under represented. Nice, clean, exact prose and her short stories are often deeply disquieting.

I haven't read Raban's fiction, but his essays and travel writing is often brilliant. The travel books are elegant and cutting, but without the nastiness and simplicity of thought that marks Paul Theroux and Bryson. It's often helped along the way by the fact that he's a brilliant descriptor of landscape: excerpts of Mississippi Water, which he wrote for Granta, is available here and there.

And then Penelope Fitzgerald is in a class of her own.

(If this post is far too earnest and longwinded, I do apologise. I've been away from /lit/ for a while.)

[Anonymous No.3363935]

The most recent authors which I'd rank as favourites are Martin Amis, Cormac McCarthy and Irvine Welsh. So yeah, I don't read a lot of contempary lit.

[Anonymous No.3363941]

I read Michael Chabon books and he released on in 2012 although it wasn't good. And almost all of the books I read are american, contemporary or not.

>>3363397

Are there any good recent novels that are set in a world like our one now, with facebook and mobile phones or whatever, or will /lit/ never admit to a book like this being good?

Imperial Bedrooms had the characters using mobiles but that's the most modern thing I've read.

[Anonymous No.3363969]

>>3363941

Michael Chabon seems to have lost it a bit recently. Like David Mitchell, he's generally best when he's playing around with genre, and Telegraph Road looked like it was going to try to be serious.

>>3363935
>The most recent authors which I'd rank as favourites are Martin Amis, Cormac McCarthy and Irvine Welsh. So yeah, I don't read a lot of contempary lit.

Have you read Alasdair Gray? His Lanark shows you what Scottish fiction can actually do. It's not as edgy as Trainspotting, but it is more thoughtful, and unlike Welsh, his books feel less like explorations on a theme of degradation.

Will Self might also be worth a look.

[Anonymous No.3364045]

>>3363688
pleb

[Anonymous No.3364106]

OP's image really made my head hurt. First I think its someone holding a book backwards against their chest, and then I see hands, and then it's a lady laying down, but I still see arms with t-shirt AAAH GOD

On a side note I suppose I read a lot of books on food and cooking, not necessarily cookbooks. Recently I've been reading the fiction works of Anthony Bourdain, which I recommend if you enjoy crime/mystery but also cooking? Other than that I tend to enjoy non-fiction over fiction.

[Anonymous No.3364127]

>>3363361
>that disgusting armhair